Apple Archive

Panther, Microsoft, and Missing Virtual PC Updates

- 2003.12.19

My neighbor bought a PowerMac G4/867 tower last year, and it came with OS 10.1 preinstalled. She upgraded to Jaguar and added an AirPort card and Base Station, as well as a printer and scanner. She upgrade to Jaguar as the promised improvements in hardware support were something that she was interested in having, especially given that HP's scanner support was weak under 10.1.

In the meantime she had been trying to set up her business with a software application that only runs on Windows. She had Virtual PC 5 installed and had the software functioning under 10.2, but when she updated to 10.3 Windows would start loading and then lock up. Eventually the mouse pointer would freeze completely.

That's something I haven't seen since Mac OS 9 - and even there it rarely happened.

I decided to check my machine to see if Virtual PC would run (I hadn't checked it since I updated to 10.3). I have Windows 98, and it booted right away. Since my neighbor's system has Windows 2000, I decided to copy over my Windows 98 image to see whether it was the OS that was the issue or VPC itself.

Windows 98 managed to boot once; after that it did exactly what Windows 2000 was doing. I decided that reinstalling VPC might help, but after reinstalling it - when it still didn't work - I wasn't happy.

I decided to proceed to the next problem she was having. Under OS 10.2, she had it set so that Yahoo Messenger would log her in as soon as she logged into the computer. It had worked fine under 10.2, but in 10.3 it would say that there was no Internet connection present. Fine, I thought, and figured that re-selecting the AirPort Base Station would fix it.

No luck. When I rebooted, I was presenting the same problem.

I eventually figured out that in 10.3, the computer looks for available base stations but doesn't connect to one until it's done looking. This means that you can't actually run anything that requires Internet access for the first 20 seconds or so after login.

I'm hoping Apple will put this back to the way it was in 10.2, because this added searching for networks (while I understand it makes it more convenient, so you don't have to connect to a network yourself) makes it inconvenient for those who want to run something like YM at startup.

After I was done with that, I was thinking that I might be able to find an online update for Virtual PC 5. Since Microsoft bought VPC from Connectix, I figured that they'd have something on their site. No, only the update for VPC 6.1 was available.

Okay then, how about the Connectix website? Nothing.

Finally, after about an hour of Google searching, I came up with a relatively obscure forum with a topic discussing the removal of all VPC 5.x related updates.

Oh that's just great. So if you don't want to get the latest version because the old one offers all the features you could possibly want, then you're automatically locked out of updates that you might have forgotten to download. You want the updates? Buy the new version.

Even Apple still offers the updates for old OSes!

I can download the 7.6.1 update as easily as I can the 10.3.1 update - and it should be the same for other software as well, even if it is Microsoft software.

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